Given the amount of raw horsepower there is available now in the data center, many IT organizations are trying to maximize utilization of servers at the lowest cost per virtual machine possible. To appeal to that constituency of the IT community, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced a HPE Proliant DL385 Gen 10 server based on EPYC system-on-chip (SOC) architecture from AMD that HPE says lowers the cost per virtual machine by as much as 50 percent.
Justin Hotard, vice president and general manager for the volume server business at HPE, says the AMD EPYC SOC architecture makes it possible to provide a more efficient balance of X86 processors, memory and I/O that results in a significant increase in the density of the overall server. That makes is more cost-effective to run a lot more virtual machines per server, says Hotard.
“There are a lot more memory lanes,” says Hotard.
In addition, Hotard notes the AMD EPYC SOC platform makes it possible to encrypt all data running in memory, and that each virtual machine and hypervisor deployed on that platform gets its own dedicated encryption key.
Obviously, AMD is locked in a long running struggle with Intel in the volume server business. HPE, of course, sells Proliant Gen10 servers based on both Intel and AMD processor technologies. The shift to SOC architectures may create a unique opportunity for AMD to gain share, especially among IT organizations that are sensitive to server costs at a time when multiple types of virtual machines continue to proliferate across the enterprise.
